Saturn’s Gift: “Inspired Melancholy”Today I was reading that the medieval astrologer, Marsilio Fincino, was the first to express the “gift of Saturn”—namely that the Saturn can be the midwife of insight. This is because depression, or “melancholia” as he called it, creates a permeable boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, and allows us to adjust issues that have gotten out of hand—real issues—our personal unfinished business. This inner reflection, or depression, is experienced like a “falling into ourselves” that brings us to the point where we are no longer able to continue with life in the usual way. Because we’re not nourished any longer by what is—by what the ego has achieved and what the world has given us, we begin creating a bridge: first insight, then action, then change.
Sounds good, but at the moment I can feel the “melancholia” with Sophie, and I don’t have insight into what she’s thinking, so the feeling hangs in the air between us today like a gray mist. I wonder how we lost yesterday’s magical synchronicity at Whitby?
So I sit here reading and journaling-- reading about how Saturn times can return us to contemplation, peace and equilibrium—or it can lead to what Carl Jung called “enantiodromia” –a complete and opposite change of attitude. This is when a condition is so polarized or severe that it polarizes into its opposite. I wonder if some of that is brewing. I read on: “Saturn marks off the stages, the ages, separating time, history and the past. We often lose energy as we move through this passage, as we are called to dance with an invisible partner. The antidote to Saturn is Jupiter, the planet of expansion, grace and opportunities, and Venus, the planet of love and connection and beauty.” Who is my invisible partner?
During Saturn Returns and transits we are more permeable to feeling the defeats of the ego and often feel unseen and lacking in direction. Jung would say this space needs to be “held and allowed” until Saturn brings its gift of insight, creating a bridge for the Self to cross over into a truer destiny path. He talked about this in “holding the tension of the opposites” till the third way (the inspiration) is made clear. It can arise from the depths of melancholia and I wonder if this is all playing out with transiting Saturn conjuncting my Sun now….I guess I’m living into it, rather than merely writing about it. When Sophie wakes up, we will decide if and when we are really going to get on that train and go visit her father…or not. I’d like to visit Carl Jung’s place there…
Hmm….it seems as if astrologers either want to make light of Saturn transits, or tend to make them the opposite—fearful. I lean towards seeing the positive restructuring that Saturn wants to build, but I’m aware that it’s a mistake to turn the darkness of Kronos (Saturn) into too much of a good thing—for this would miss the fact that what appears to be the dark night of the Soul still is dark (!)--a “Nigredo” experience—even though it’s the awakening of imagination. Before movement, there is no movement, or stuckness.
Sophie is often a late sleeper. Yesterday she explored Whitby by herself for awhile as I retreated to my room to rest and read…yet even with my books and journal I feel this touch of melancholia—it’s true, Saturn is on my Sun, and I haven’t seen the bridge to the future yet. I wait for insight.
I wait for Sophie….and then…? Will I wait for Alistair? Is he waiting for us? I wish one could take a dose of Venus and Jupiter as easy as one can take vitamin supplements….ah…I hear a stirring from the bedroom….
